


Remain Nameless

by GirlDressedInBlack



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-12 15:00:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29262387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GirlDressedInBlack/pseuds/GirlDressedInBlack
Summary: The Doctor dies and the Mistress wanders until she does too.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6
Collections: The Florence Collection





	Remain Nameless

**Author's Note:**

> So this would have been five days earlier at least but by strange and sad coincidence I found out that a dear friend of mine, who I haven't been able to see for a year because of covid, had died ten days before, about half an hour after finishing writing the plan for this. I didn't change it but obviously it took me a second to get past the loudest parts of grief.

The Mistress watches his body fall, laughing for a moment before she sees the laxness of his body, the lack of all control and his body falls and with it her face, concern ripping through her as if she was the one who had been shot.

She clatters, scrambling back against the wall as she stares at his body, his body on the floor, on the metal grating over the drop, his body still. It's silent to her, the clamour of the nearing creatures, the ones who had been chasing them both.

She had been about to make a deal with them, break even, but then he'd had to come and interrupt it all and now, now he was there, dead on the floor.

And she's crouched back against the wall, spine aligned with it as she tries to push herself away from the horror of his body, there on the floor, no glow, spent. Her knees are against her chest and her arms feel movement though they are still, as limp as he is, his body,

on the floor.

And she sees legs move, conceal him, tries to move to keep him in sight but doesn't and her sight is blurring and she looks up and- of course he's dead and dying and he's been doing that the whole time.

Of course he was always dying, that's why he was so reckless, so stubborn, careless of the consequences to himself.

She tries to track back the behaviour, find the pattern but in the end she just doesn't know anymore, which of him came when, when she's seen each him. Their timelines are tangled and frayed like old yarn, splitting and twisting and twining together.

And she looks, tries to look with her eyes, and she's surrounded by these people with their guns and they're talking to her, saying things which she can't understand right now, can't answer. They're talking to each other too, looking at her and the noise is too much and she's crying and they're looking down at her and they killed him and she can still hear them talking about the deal they were going to make.

"The deal's off- you killed him." She chokes out under her breath and it must be enough for them to hear because the one one in front of her cocks its head, dispassionate, and raises its gun and for a moment there is silence and darkness.

* * *

And then she comes to and his body is gone and she's lying alone near a river.

The sky is purple and largely devoid of stars.

She gets up.

Her body is stiff and it feels different than when she usually regenerates.

She puts a hand to her chest and waits for the space of three sets of beats, four.

Out of time and not correcting.

She aches all over and feels far too warm even as she sheds her jacket and tries to figure out where she is out of habit.

She shakes her head a little at herself after staring at the sky for a few minutes and chuckles, no words needed in the quiet. The sound is followed by a feeling of grief which rends her to tears again as she calls her tardis to her.

It appears, silent as she asks, and waits while she lets herself cry, lets herself come to the realisation again that she won't be able to see him, touch him, hear his voice, ever again.

Eventually she steps inside and her course is decided in a moment, just as sentimental as he had always wanted her to be.

"Let's go back." She says to the console room in her breaking voice.

Her tardis hums in response, edges of the room blurred dark, as it knows as deeply as she does what is happening with the burning sensation at the tips of her fingers and the prickling under her nails.

* * *

The Mistress travels mostly in her last hours, spending seconds and minutes and the odd hour in all the places they've been together, breathing the air of places in collapse, trapped and some which have been long forgotten by everyone else. Everything tastes of dust and electric, itching on her tongue like licking aspirin.

She comes at last to the shattered globes of gallifrey and leaves her tardis there.

For a moment she waits outside the closed doors, rests her head and her hand on it and apologises in that wordless way that only a tardis and their bonded can.

With a feeling of acknowledgement humming inside of her chest like a soft light, somehow warding off the flames consuming most of her flesh by now, she goes onwards, into the broken city, through the fractured roads.

* * *

The journey is difficult with her body failing as it is but she manages to keep going until she reaches the gates of the Academy, ripped open and split with the force, shards of wood resting everywhere around her as she finally falls to her knees and gives out another ragged gasp.

Her vision begins to fade but she swears that she can see him, in all his forms, shining and smiling and holding out a hand to her.

His body flickers and overlaps and gets things wrong in a way that can only seem right. He burns with the energy of one thousand suns, so bright and endless and beautiful.

The Mistress doesn't know how but she finds the energy to stand and she is alight too, tongues of flame pouring off of her skin and hair and clothes.

She holds him close, feels the idea of the structure of his body under her arms, the solidity of him.

He says no words but somehow she thinks that he sounds happy or that it sounds happy, to be with him finally.

He holds her back just as tightly.


End file.
